Nokia Messaging – Nokia World 2008 Announcement

Looks like Nokia Email is coming out of beta!

I hope all the new functionality is available on old phones!

Nokia Messaging – Nokia World 2008 Announcement: “

Written by Davis Fields, Nokia Email service Nokia Messaging team

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Hello beta testers!

It’s Davis Fields, coming to you live from Barcelona from the Nokia World conference where we officially announced Nokia Messaging – the complete messaging solution for Nokia devices. For all the official information regarding what Nokia Messaging is, please check out the press release.

I’d like to give our faithful beta users more information. What we called Nokia Email service is now the S60 email portion of the overall Nokia Messaging solution. Nokia Messaging will be the best way to use your existing email and instant messaging accounts on all Nokia devices. There is a significant update of Nokia Messaging coming out in the next two weeks – containing a lot of exciting new features, including significant performance increases in client performance and battery life.

Please check out David Dueblin’s post below on the exciting launch of Mail on Ovi as well. Nokia Messaging will seamlessly access Mail on Ovi accounts just like other email accounts, offering the same great features. Users can use their ovi.com email address to sign up for Nokia Messaging and access their email through Nokia Messaging on their Nokia phones.

I’ll post plenty more information regarding Nokia Messaging when we post our next update on http://email.nokia.com. We look forward to improving upon Nokia Email service with a complete email and instant messaging solution in Nokia Messaging.

– Davis Fields

(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)

Phone blogging!

Here is my first phone written blog. Not the rubbish email ones i did ages ago but honest proper ones using scribe. Apparently the best Symbian based one. It seems to be good, although any such phone tool that does not allow you to see the state of the t7 spelling seems flawed to me. lets see how this looks!

Major update for Nokia Email service

Nokia Beta labs have released an update for Nokia (push) email. Sounds very promising! I’m especially pleased by deleting email on the server, and also able to add more than a single email account. Both of these I’d sent in feedback about. Cool!

Major update for Nokia Email service: see your suggestions coming to life: “

Guest writer: Davis Fields, Nokia Email service team

Hello Beta Labs!

Today, the Nokia Email service team is proud to announce the first updated beta release. Nokia Email service is designed for Nokia device owners to make mobile email easily discovered and intuitive. Since we launched on August 8th, we’ve received thousands of questions, suggestions and positive feedback about Nokia Email service. We’re pleased to say that we’ve taken four of the most popular feedback requests from our users and implemented them in this release.

  • Localization. We’re now localized into six different languages, including full support for international characters, which has been a very popular request from our beta testers from all around the world. This release localized in English, Finnish, German, Dutch, Latin American Spanish and Iberian Spanish.
  • More email addresses. Now Nokia Email lets you get mail from up to 6 email addresses, each in its own mailbox yet all in one place, and makes composing from any account seamless.
  • More phones. Nokia Email service is available on more of the most popular Nokia S60 devices, including many of the latest S60 3.2 devices like the N96 and the N78.
  • Better mailbox management. When you delete an email on your Nokia phone, it will be deleted from your email account. We’ve enabled this for both IMAP and POP accounts.

If your request is not on this list, that doesn’t mean we’re not working on it. For instance, the bug where messages didn’t appear in the sent folder has been fixed (messages will now appear in the sent folder after they have been sent). One area I want to highlight that we’re working on is Google-Apps hosted email. The setup is currently not working correctly for Google Apps and similarly hosted domains (where the email address domain is different than the mail server domains). We are aware of this and are working diligently to implement those accounts in future releases.

Again, keep the feedback coming in, and we hope you enjoy this new version.

– Davis Fields

(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)

Nokia push email beta service

I’ve just started using the beta of the Nokia push email service. Seems fairly good, and reliable. It works for any IMAP/POP3 email account. Basically it takes your account details, then the server at Nokia logs on to the POP3/IMAP server and checks your email for you. If you have any email it then pushes it to your phone. I’m not quite sure how it works for SMTP sending. Perhaps this is done directly from the phone, as I see no advantage to doing this via the Nokia server. A pretty simple concept, and as long as you trust Nokia with your email account then it’s a good one.

You do need a decent data plan though as it keeps an open data connection at all times. I guess most push email services do the same. That’s bad if you are in a non3G area as any phone call will interrupt the data connection.

The main downside I think is that it seems to ignore the read status of my email. That’s bad for me as my mail is accessed via imap by two other clients (Evolution on Linux and Mail.app on OS X). So reading on one does not propagate this to the others. A related issue is that it also does not delete emails on the server. Which in hindsight is good as I never realised that the default setting is to delete email over 2 days old. I could have lost a lot of email there 🙂 Anybody who uses POP3 only will not care about these, but as a purely IMAP mail person, it’s a step backwards.

Another limitation is that you can only have a single account being pushed. That’s a limitation which I hope is lifted when it goes properly live.

Otherwise it seems fairly reliable. The client looks quite flashy, and I guess is the future of S60’s interface. Big bold, almost iPhoney icons, and lots of animation.

If you want push email for a Nokia phone I would recommend it. It’s also free at the moment. I doubt it will be when it’s released.

3G down with O2

So I come on a long journey stocked up with spare battery n laptop, to find no internet access via my phone. After endless waiting on the O2 helpline I find that the entire UK O2 3G network is down. Wow! I guess I’m not along in being internetless on the train today!

JoikuSpot- S60 to wireless Router

Now this is very, very cool, and about time.
JoikuSpot

Normally to connect your laptop via your 3G phone, you need to use it as a Bluetooth modem. Whilst this gives good speeds (well as fast as Bluetooth will allow) it does require setting up, and the use of 3rd party scripts in the case of my MacBook Pro.

Since most decent smartphones also have wifi now, it’s been discussed as to when you’re going to be able to use a 3G/S60/UIQ (perhaps even Windows) as a wireless Router. Connect your laptop to the ad hoc wireless network on your phone, and all external net access get placed over the 3G connection. Bloody great, and kudos to this company. Just think, you and some friends are all in a restaurant that does not offer free wireless. With your unlimited data plan, you get out your smartphone, pop it on the table and you and your (sad) friends connect their laptops instead of having a Conversation. Cool!

EDIT I’d forgotten I broke the wlan on my E90. Might take me a while to test this out.

Sony Ericsson m600i

Well I’ve spent a week now with my new phone. Overall I’m pretty chuffed. The phone is easily as powerful and functional as my previous p910i. But it’s in a much smaller package. Much thinner. Yet the keyboard is excellent, and the screen’s resolution really makes a difference. There are a few issues. Unfortunately Vodafone (with whom I have a contract), have played silly buggers with the firmware, and it’s not as good as it could be. For example they have removed the menu easy access button. Instead forcing you to go through the painfully slow main menu buttons. Infact if you click the top left hand corner, a button does click down without doin anything!! Doh!!

The thinness also comes with a price of no camera. Neither does it have wifi, which the p990i (replacement for p910i) does.

I had forgotten just how much software I had bought for the old phone. Unfortunately it seems most of this was registered to the old phone, and I may have to rebuy. Ouch!!!